I

There are many ways to be in the groove. The commission-driven

salesman, always in the lead finds himself in the groove the business groove.
Jimmy the drummer says that is is in the pocket!
The preacher in Crown Heights is in a rhetorical Groove that is to say he has
found his mojo. The line chef preparing the sushi has found Zen and the writer whose
fingers dancing on the keyboard, well, you get the point.
The trio whose drummer and bass player are locked into a clock-like mind-meld
creating a crevice for the piano to crawl through, stealing from the exciting energy of
each fresh moment as it flies through time are in the groove.
The dancers, hearing this music, flailing their arms and throwing their partners
along sensed waves of rhythm, shaking their hips and shuffling their feet in perfect grace
are in a dancing groove.
And the sliding window that never fails to slide or, fall off its track, is in a groove;
a mechanical engineering groove.
While these associations of groove are diverse enough to confuse even the most
organized thinkers, they do share a common denominator. Ergo there is such a
phenomenon, be it physical or other, known as groove. It is unchanging, whether being
applied to a sliding window, swing dancers, jazz musicians, a writer, gospel preacher,
salesman, or even a cheese grater.
I think I encountered the essence of groove twice in my life. The first time when
as a guitarist playing in a quartet, I experienced communication with the other
musicians where we made silent agreements on a psychic plane about the direction the
improvised music would take. Ours was like E.S.P, all who were in the music studio and
the lawn and the wh ole festival. The second happened at a wedding. On the dance floor

there was unity among the people moving their bodies, all agreeing on the steps of some
un-choreographed pseud0-tribal dance; so that no two people on the floor ever bumped
into each other and there was a psychic connection so what I was doing with my body
seemed to present a reaction to what the person next to me was doing with theirs, or
vice versa. Or we were all being spun, twisted, twirled, bumped and playfully shoved by
Terpischore, perched on a cloud above!
The vibrations were cylinder.
And after a while, I became convinced that somehow, in turn, the powerful
psychic energy on the dance floor was sending messages back to the musicians, driving
the rhythm of the drummer in new directions and forcing the soloist to make new
statements, commenting on the motion of the dancers and swept away by it on an
invisible wave. This is what I considered to be groove.
Have you seen a break dancer move their body as if their bones were elastic? Or
in staccato jerks, imitate the strobe movements of a robot?
And what about the genius tap dancer who needs not necessarily an audible
rhythm to dance to, yet feels one, creating a percussive accompaniment to the rhythm
which is not heard defying the idea that dance is a reaction to music, and suggesting it
must be born from the same third-party source the same groove.
(And if indeed a musical groove is attainable without an audible rhythm or other
sound, and if not removed from music itself, then we will assume it is a result of music
once heard and recorded in the memory bank).
Be it the syncopated 4/4 Rhythms of funk music, or salsa, or the swish-flapping
wind shield wipers of the car any organization of sound creates a groove. Though, one
has to know how to uncover it, use it; enjoy it. This is what melts a good salsa or breakdancer into elasticity, and programs the funky robot.
Then shall we assume that the groove is a byproduct of the rhythm of the
Universe constructed, written or choreographed before the first note is heard?

The term groove has managed to creep into our slang lexicon, though alas
without an appreciation for the words origins.
The concept of groove is certainly related to the concept of rhythm. We often hear
the phrase, timing is everything. We are talking about rhythm when we say, I am
really in a good groove at Work. Or the musicians were really hooked into a deep
groove. This means that the rhythm which the mind is applying to the activity is close
to perfection. Or the activitys relation to the time applied is so close to perfection that
rhythm no longer matters. And when we say, I am feeling groovy, it means that the
mind was able to conquer the obstacles presented by time or the stress caused thereby
and it is indeed a rewarding feeling that is, one who feels groovy feels happy. When
we are in the groove, we lose our concept of time.
The pressures of time have driven people to heart attacks and nervous
breakdowns. So the trick of getting in the groove is to release oneself from such
unhealthy constraints.
As a response to the above expressed inquiry, we shall not assume groove is a
byproduct of rhythm nor shall we assume it has to do with the natural rhythm of the
Universe. Instead, lets say groove is actually created by the mind when it happens on
the ability to conquer such patterns of time.
(Or perhaps the mind is simply a tool used to uncover it its domain, elsewhere
or mysterious).
Another definition of groove is a narrow and long channel, like the gutters in a
bowling alley; or the marks on a screw or, behold, the grooves on a vinyl record for
instance, from whence the musical connotation is derived.
Hence we call groove no matter to what we are applying the term a niche or
pocket, usually long and narrow. And it must be one that ignores or offends the regular
pattern. It finds a way to subjugate any stressful or confining measure of time, such as
mundane rhythms or deadlines or smooth even surfaces or graphical outlines on a page.

He that attains a groove in his activity has defeated the negative, pressurecausing constraints of time. If the gargantuan, architectural constructions or the fastmoving transportation of the Industrial Revolution managed to defeat, in a way, the
formidable factor of space I insist man overcomes the nervous conditions and
constrictions of time by reaching a state of groove.

II
The groove vibration felt by a musician on the dancefloor is as noted above
related to a natural rhythm felt in the drift of a point or event as it travels through the
expanding universe. Two of the components of the universe, space and time are deemed
infinite. Put together, they create an infinite bank of rhythms. The groove is created
when the rhythm as a sub-product of time unfolds into the three dimensions of space:
length, height and width. These may be sped up or slowed down in tempo by adding
velocity.
The notion of spacetime is not something new. Aristotle says the two belong in
the same class of quantities. Einstein agrees with him, refers to space and time as
being doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will
preserve an independent reality. 1

1 On September 21, 1908 Hermann Minkowski began his talk at the 80th
Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Physicians with the now famous
introduction:The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of
experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time
by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an
independent reality. [1, p. 75]

Hermann Minkowski, "Space and Time" in Hendrik A. Lorentz, Albert Einstein,

Hermann Minkowski, and Hermann Weyl, The Principle of Relativity: A Collection of
Original Memoirs on the Special and General Theory of Relativity (Dover, New York,
1952) pp. 75-91. http://www.spacetimesociety.org/minkowski.html

Time, past, present, and future, forms a continuous whole. says Aristotle in the
Physics. (This idea is similar to the descriptive terms used to define God in the Hebrew
Torah: or YAWEH, which means past He was..., present: He is, and
. That is He will be). These unite above in the Godly realm, according to Kabbalah,
and so time becomes unified as one whole, endless and beyond boundaries. Aristotle:
Space, likewise, is a continuous quantity; for the parts of a solid occupy a certain space,
and these have a common boundary2 The boundaries of objects found in space are
animate in Aristotles space. According to Einstein, space; that is what makes up the
universe is constantly expanding.
In the phenomenon of groove there must be an art performed. That is to say the
groove itself, as metaphysical phenomenon has to have a trigger in the physical universe
to produce a psychic reception. Likewise, two parallel tracks do not create a groove until
something rides along them. The dancer does not bend until the music does and
likewise.
Minkowskis spacetime is drawn from Euclidean geometry in which there exist
three dimensions in space (length, height and width); these are combined with time, in a
way in which the latter element may not be subtracted.
This space, that is, the physical fabric of the universe is not to be perceived until
some kind of event occurs on a coordinate grid such as an art that is being performed.
These events, when mapped out on the grid, create a groove in the universe.
Of the psychic reception of groove, such as the vibrations felt during a tribal or
folk ceremony or a dancefloor or field, it may be stated that the physical implications of
time (that is rhythm or tempo) when placed in space (that is the metaphysical groove
being felt by dancers) creates a gravitational vibration. The groove is not only made by
artists, musicians and dancers, it can also be sensed, and illuminated by them. The
gravitational field pulls them along it, so that the rhythm in the universe, the groove
may be celebrated.

2 The Categories. Aristotle. Chapter 1.6. http://genius.com/Aristotle-thecategories-chap-16-annotated

The groove is not an empty hole in artistic meaning like what John Keats terms
Negative Capability3.It is neither inner nor outer. It is both inside and outside. You
may travel through it. It is expansive and ultimately infinite. Likewise it may be used for
travel. You can take the groove from dimension a) to dimension b). And if groove
matches Hawkings Black Hole theory, then you must pay attention lest you discover
more about the universe than you are able to understand.
The groove can either be mathematical or a-mathematical. That is to say, it exists
on accord with and is illuminated by spacetime theory, yet one attains groove as a state
of mind the best when he or she forgets about the cognitive science and mathematics
such as in modern physics and focuses more on something else or on nothingness, such
as in Zen. Similarly, the standard notation of music is imperfect. That is to say, as a
code, it may be seen as a sketching of some universal form in time which is a song.
Though as you will hear time and again, while such concepts as musical rhythm, fractal
designs and General Relativity may be graphed-out as a curve, the mathematics for the
coordinates are not exact they are imperfect, therefore a mathematical rendering of
the groove is impossible. Only a Platonic impression remains.
The American World War I-era poet, Ezra Pound, writes much about a
mysterious vortex and Vorticist poetry and art; in here there are hints at attaining
groove. He speaks in his essaying of the abstract-geometrical painting of turn-ocentury Briton Wyndham Lewis:
Lewis is Bach. No, it is incorrect to say that Lewis is Bach, but our feeling is
that certain works of Picasso and certain works of Lewis have in them something
which is to painting what certain qualities of Bach are to music. Music was
vorticist in the Bach-Mozart period, before it went off into romance and
sentiment and description. A new vorticist music would come from a new
computation of the mathematics of harmony, not from a mimetic representation
of dead cats in a fog-horn, alias noise-tuners.

3 Keats, John.

Besides for the lack of groove being felt in romantic art, he means to say that
mathematical music such as in the baroque period creates a sort of groove. This is what
Pound means by vortex. But certainly, he wishes to say it is the written notation and
tabulation which forms the outline of what we will call groove, whilst the musician
performing the written work or adding a slight improvisation is the one engaging in the
art.
It is specifically the music of Bach and a little Mozart which is considered groovy.
That is to say, as a constant phenomenon, the groove may easily be missed. If one
performed a Bach minuet and thought too much about timing, i.e., signature and tempo,
then they failed to reach the groove.
The musician should actually be able to see what they are doing, sonically. Seeing
sound would be like grooving.
The image has been defined as that which presents an intellectual and
emotional complex in an instant of time. (Looking at audio waves might give us a hint
of what this means). Now consider the writing of Pound:
no artist can possibly get a vortex into every poem or picture he does. One
would like to do so, but it is beyond one. Certain things seem to demand metrical
expression, or expression in a rhythm more agitated than the rhythms acceptable
to prose, and these subjects, though they do not contain a vortex, may have some
interest, an interest as criticism of life or of art. It is natural to express these
things, and a vorticist or imagiste writer may be justified in presenting a certain
amount of work which is not vorticism or imagisme, just as he might be justified
in printing a purely didactic prose article. Unfinished sketches and drawings have
a similar interest; they are trials and attempts toward a vortex.
One might pick up a newspaper and find a style of writing which is not so
transcendental, where it is clear that the writer was not able to maintain a groove in
what he was doing. The more abstract and figurative writing tends to be, in order for it
to express a simple point, the more apt it is to capture the essence of groove; that is, to

put the reader there. Vortex sketching and drawings which are unfinished to not signify
completion because they are time images on an otherwise infinite space of
measurement. That is to say, the canvas is the space, the unfinished image painted on it
is the finite boundary which hints at endlessness. As Ezra Pound puts it:

The DESIGN of the future in the grip of the human vortex. All the past that is
vital, all the past that is capable of living into the future, is pregnant in the vortex,
NOW.
Hedonism is the vacant place of a vortex, without force, deprived of past and
of future, the vertex of a small spool or cone.4

Considering what is written about the vortex, think now on other geometrical shapes
when imagining the groove. Benoit Mandelbrot identifies the phenomenon of fractals.
Appearing slightly psychedelic, fractals are infinite curves which may be felt by winding
through space inversely off an ordinary line pattern. You are still drawing a 1
dimensional line, but there exists what is called a fractal dimension which resembles
a surface. So imagine that you are riding in the passenger seat of a car and the window is
rolled open as the vehicle moves along the highway at a speed of 70 miles per hour or
faster. Your hand is a constant variable moving against the current, which is the velocity
of the car as it rolls down the road your hand pointed outward, sticking out the
window creates a wind tunnel, as it cuts through the air. You wave it up and down and
feel the cool breeze, the strange design you of wind you can feel the groove on your hand
but you cannot see it. Now imagine that color dye has been added to the air and to your
hand. The air is red, but your hand juxtaposed and creating a resistance to it is colored
blue. The wind pushes some of the blue light from your hand and forms kind of an
outline, a blue trace of the groove in the red wind. According to Mandelbrot, in his 1983
work, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, such fractal patterns are ubiquitous in nature
however, when most people hear the term, fractal, they are thinking of fractal art and
4 Vortex Pound, Ezra. Published in 1914. Blast Magazine.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/238700

not patterns in nature which cannot be given a definite growth pattern and therefore
create a liquid like movement which curves through a groove. The term comes from the
Latin, fractus which means fractured or broken, and this term was coined by Dr.
Mandelbrot, whose own work, queer as it may seem, was inspired by one Paul Levy a
20th century French philosopher who wrote a paper in 1938 entitled Plane or Space
Curves and Surfaces Consisting of Parts Similar to the Whole. In this early thesis, the
author describes a new fractal curve which is often made example of in geometrical
pedagogy and referred to as Levy C curve. In the paper, Fractals and Chaos (2004),
Mandelbrot describes fractals as objects which have dimensions greater than their
topological dimension. This creates as infinite groove on the graph.
To make models of the graph, various forms of software have been written to draw out
two dimensional fractals on three dimensional spaces. Special algorithms are written to
graph out such natural phenomena as cells of the nervous system and blood and lung
vasculature. Imperfect and shifting shapes known as fractals may be also found in the
rings around the planet Saturn, sea waves, DNA and crystals; broccoli, cognitive
subjective perception, heart beats, geometrical optics, river networks and fault lines
Mandelbrot finds them in mountain ranges and coastlines. Some commonly used
fractal-generating software are: Aros Fractals, Artlandia, ChaosPro, Easy Fractal for
Macintosh, Double Fractal, Fractal Image Generator, Ghost Diagrams, Mandelbrot
Applet, Mandelbrot Explorer, Online Fractal Generator, Two-Dimensional L-Systems,
Seractal Fractals Screensaver and the list goes on5.

III
There is form in space, and it is bound to dissipate into oneness. But more importantly,
there is form in time. A song in the groove has form in time, which easily slips back
into formless time. Ann Danielson of the University of Oslo did a paper on James
Browns Funky Drummer: In groove-oriented music, she writes, The basic unit of
the song is repeated so many times that our inclination as listeners to organize the
5 https://www.dmoz.org/Science/Math/Chaos_and_Fractals/Software

musical material into an overall form gradually fades away. Instead of waiting for events
to come, she continues, we are submerged in what is before us. Dancing, playing, and
listening in such a state of being are not characterized by consideration or reflection but
rather by a presence in the here and now of the event. It is likely to believe that there is a
connection between such an experience and the ways in which a groove is designed. 6
Clearly, she would agree that her conception of a groove as she writes it, resembles a
cone or small spool as in the essay by Pound.
Classically, musicians in the West have been trained to perform a melody in the
context of the song and not in direct concert with the metronome. This is not so in
groove music. For it is actually a freeing of form which creates the groove in space, both
musically and on the consciousness of the musician. The relation of subject and object
is almost suspended. We operate within a continuous field where the limit between
music and listener is not yet established or has vanished. writes Ann Danielson in her
essay on a popular James Brown number.
Picture yourself on a circular wheel, such as the ones you played on as a child on
the playground. Three or so children could fit on the large wooden circles, and with your
feet you pushed off the ground with one leg so that the wheel spun faster and faster. As
you spun, like a giant dreidel, the landscape blurred into one; even gave the visual
sensation of bending.
Let us recall now Ezra Pounds aesthetic treatise on the Vortex in which he
introduces Euclidean geometry as a critic of form and not an author of one.
when one studies Euclid one finds that the relation of a+b=c applies to the
ratio between the squares on the two sides of a right-angled triangle and the
square on the hypotenuse. One still writes it a+b=c, but one has begun to talk
about form. Another property or quality of life has crept into ones matter. Until
then one had dealt only with numbers. But even this statement does
6 PopScriptum 11. The Groove issue. http://www2.huberlin.de/fpm/popscrip/themen/pst11/pst11_danielsen.html

not create form. The picture is given you in the proposition about the square on
the hypotenuse of the right-angled triangle being equal to the sum of the squares
on the two other sides. Statements in plane or descriptive geometry are like talk
about art. They are a criticism of the form. The form is not created by them.
When, as he puts it, the right-angled triangle being equal to the sum of the squares on
the two other sides a transformation of form has happened, but this can only happen
when a message is sent which travels through the groove.
The post-Einstein Physicist Stephen Hawking addresses the geometric realities
and constraints of the planet floating about in space. In a famous lecture he delivered in
1999 he said:
The surface of the Earth, is what is called a two dimensional space. That is, you
can move on the surface of the Earth, in two directions at right angles to each
other: you can move north south, or east west. But of course, there is a third
direction at right angles to these two, and that is up or down. That is to say, the
surface of the Earth exists in three-dimensional space. The three dimensional
space is flat. That is to say, it obeys Euclidean geometry. The angles of a triangle,
add up to a hundred and eighty degrees. However, one could imagine a race of
two dimensional creatures, who could move about on the surface of the Earth,
but who couldn't experience the third direction, of up or down. They wouldn't
know about the flat three-dimensional space, in which the surface of the Earth
lives. For them, space would be curved, and geometry would be non-Euclidean. 7
But in another lecture, he recalls Einstein and one-ups his theory of General Relativity,
describing the possibility for Black Holes in the galaxy: space-time was not flat, he
said. But was warped and curved by the matter and energy in it. In order to understand
this, considered a sheet of rubber, with a weight placed on it, to represent a star. The
weight will form a depression in the rubber, and will cause the sheet near the star to be
curved, rather than flat.
7 Space and Time Warps. Hawkings, Stephen. http://www.hawking.org.uk/space-and-timewarps.html. 1999.

If one now rolls marbles on the rubber sheet, their paths will be curved, rather
than being straight lines. In 1919, a British expedition to West Africa, looked at
light from distant stars, that passed near the Sun during an eclipse. They found
that the images of the stars were shifted slightly from their normal positions. This
indicated that the paths of the light from the stars had been bent by the curved
space-time near the Sun. [] Consider now placing heavier and heavier, and
more and more concentrated weights on the rubber sheet. They will depress the
sheet more and more. Eventually, at a critical weight and size, they will make a
bottomless hole in the sheet, which particles can fall into, but nothing can get out
of. 8

As previously stated, the groove, then likewise, is not something created by

mathematics, or even by music. It is not just a state of mind like being in a jolly mood.
Ezra Pound writes on Descartian or analytical geometry:

Thus, we learn that the equation (x-a)+(y-b)=r governs the circle. It is the
circle. It is not a particular circle, it is any circle and all circles. It is nothing that is
not a circle. It is the circle free of space and time limits. It is the universal,
existing in perfection, in freedom from space and time. Mathematics is dull
ditchwater until one reaches analytics. But in analytics we come upon a new way
of dealing with form. It is in this way that art handles life. The difference between
art and analytical geometry is the difference of subject-matter only. Art is more
interesting in proportion as life and the human consciousness are more complex
and more interesting than forms and numbers.9

8 Does God Play Dice?. Hawkings, Stephen. http://www.hawking.org.uk/does-godplay-dice.html. 1999.

9 Vortex. Pound, Ezra. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/238700

Hool-a-hoop is an excellent example of what Ezra Pound intends. A hool-a-hoop

is a thin plastic tube which fits around most human hips so that the hoop does not touch
the body at any point, but only barely so, missing it just slightly. Someone stands inside
the hoop and by thrusting the hips from side to side and even back to front, the hoop
begins spinning, using the persons hips as the cause of its motion. To master this
childrens game, practice is needed and a certain degree of natural ability.
Even if the groove is created mathematically with location units on a plane, there
is a graphical bend which occurs. The less of a bend on the grid, the lesser the form. If
what Pound writes about Euclidean geometry and the Cartesian circle, then it is safe to
say that groove music cannot be written. Standard notation may only capture the groove
of a particular rhythm. Modern groove music (such as electronica), as with ancient
African music, written tabulation may only bring out one aspect of the groove rhythm,
and not the entire piece. Like a sketching, or Platonic particulars, the universal groove
itself is not an algebraic equation.

IV
The Minkowski metric can be written as a four-by-four matrix. In general
relativity, matter (energy) is added to spacetime giving its coordinates a curve in their
structure. This actually adds a fifth dimension to Minkowskis four-dimension
spacetime, so besides for the three-dimensions of space, with un-subtractable time,
there is now energy. These create force-fields with gravitational pull. Apply now the
bending of a line drawn on a coordinate graph built in spacetime, to the curvature of the
bodies on the floor of the disco-tech during an especially spacey number. They bend,
they curve and twist, moving through the groove around the structure. The mass of their
presence on the space of the dancefloor creates a curve were the event to be mapped out
on a Euclidean graph. A gravitational field may be devised when the bodies move to pull
away from the cerebral vibrations and chorographical directions deriving in the music
itself, and the opposite reaction when the bodies are pulled in. The repetition, the event
happens so many times, slow the rhythm down, the bending in the gravitational field

the vibration felt by the dancers. The dancers might sense an unwritten choreograph,
and they may sense as close to a nullification of horizontal gravity as possible, sensed by
a lightness of the feet.
The connection between music and dance, and the certain value of music and the
certain value of dance as it relates to a groove scenario enters the realm of neuroscience.
In February of 2012, Stefan T. Tomic, Petr Janata and Jason M. Haberman did a study
published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology entitled Sensorimotor coupling in
music and the psychology of groove. The abstract reads as follows:

The urge to move in response to music, combined with the positive affect
associated with the coupling of sensory and motor processes while engaging with
music (referred to as sensorimotor coupling) in a seemingly effortless way, is
commonly described as the feeling of being in the groove. 10

This is why certain effects are used to compliment music at a dance party such as strobe
lights and lasers; and equally worth mentioning, the synthesized texture and effects
which may be added to a sound by an electronic fader, such as phaser, delay, echo, etc.
In the thesis of the academic article, Sensorimotor coupling in music, the concept of
the groove [is] widely appreciated and understood in terms of a pleasurable drive
toward action. That means to say, groove music induces a euphoric state in the listener.
It makes you want to dance, or nod your head, at least. The repetitive and percussively
performed harmonic structures in concert with the syncopated, sometimes downbeat or
medium tempo rhythm leave one feeling calm and inspired to find a groove in the
rhythmic structure. Since, as the study puts it a broad range of musical excerpts can
be appraised reliably for the degree of perceived groove, we can assume that if one were
at a piano recital, say, it would be harder to find a groove than at a rock concert, say for
instance; that is, unless the pianist was playing the syncopated, percussive/rhythmic
10 Janata, Petr; Tomic, Sean T.; Haberman, Jason M: Sensorimotor coupling in music
and the psychology of the groove. Journal of Experimental Psychology; General, Vol
141(1), Feb 2012, 54-75.

piano style known as honky-tonk. Also worth mentioning, that Ann Danielsen finds
James Browns Funky Drummer the appropriate specimen for the application of
groove, as opposed to This is a Mans World, for example, stands to certify the above
quoted thesis.
In the third part of the study done by Haberman, Tomic and Janata, the bridge
between the mind of the listener and the music itself as an independent monolith, is
crossed: the degree of experienced groove is inversely related to difficulty of bimanual
sensorimotor coupling under tapping regimes with varying levels of expressive
constraint This relates to the phenomenon of randomly finding oneself tapping on a
table in time, even if there is no music in the background. Someone may ask you if you
can Please stop, or That is impolite. Some people perhaps do not have this
experience at all; but it is certain that if there is music in the room and somebody is
tapping along high-groove stimuli elicit spontaneous rhythmic movements, then
quantifiable measures of the quality of sensorimotor coupling predict the degree of
experienced groove: so one would factor in talent and rhythmic inclination.
As for sensory motor coupling, one must consider the light show at a rock
concert or dance party to suggest the effect of a groove ambiance. Certain lights are
programmed to flash and change in time with the music through a sort of sonic motion
detector. This doubtlessly induces a trancelike state in partygoers who find themselves
able to dance with more alacrity; the worries and troubles of the day dissipate from
them as their minds play a game of focus on the metaphysical: matters of groove.

V
Groove is a state of mind which can be found in most any activity. It is a mood, a mode.
In music, we have reached the pseudo-genre groove with an understanding of
syncopated rhythm. Syncopation in music is what makes the rhythm of the piece sound
off-kilter, or imperfect according to the laws of time. Either way, music in standard
notation is not a carbon statement. It is to some degree a sketching. This is true of the
notes placed on and between the staves (harmonically) and the key signature, as well as

with the time-signature and tempo which can only be fractioned-off on the chart and
felt by the performer reading the score.
A syncopated rhythm, therefore, stands for the rhythmic possibilities of a piece of
music which are inside the groove. One can also, as an instrumentalist or dancer, find
the groove-space in a perfect, non-syncopated rhythm, by simply ignoring the time
signature and rhythm cues and playing the opposite. But as for syncopated rhythms,
such as those which emphasize the downbeat the first beat in a measure as the
rhythmic center, one could say there are particular denominations of music that always
invite the performers and listeners to follow the groove recipe: jazz, rhythm and blues,
funk, gospel, hip hop, reggae, rock n roll, Latin, electronica, heavy metal, etc. The
backbeat is a syncopated stress on the off beat this is the opposite of the downbeat.
The downbeat is the beat in a measure, where the conductors baton is at the lowest
point in its motion. It is this distance between downbeat beat 1 and backbeat beat 2
which creates the groove and so this type of music is usually accompanied by
improvisational dance. But overtime, throughout the course of Western music, the style
of free dance changed. This phenomenon probably began in Baptist churches in
America. This dancing, stomping and clapping to spirituals was moved to the ballroom
floor where the Gospel was exchanged for booze and the spiritual Godhead was
temporarily pushed aside.
The true meaning of the term swing is often lost, or connotations of it are so skewed we
must awkwardly go at the words meaning from unseen angles and perspectives. If a
conductor or bandleader tells one of the musicians to Make that rhythm swing., he is
demanding something mental and even ontological of the musician. He is saying, Play
the rhythm in the pocket., which means: Get into the groove. But a swing beat may be
tabulated, for instance, a hard swing rhythm is a dotted eighth followed by a sixteenth
note. All succinct eight notes which do not share an even count, so that they are at an
asymmetrical value where one is longer than the next and vice versa or one is stressed
more than the other, like in the case of our hypothetical drummer and his downbeat
backbeat scenario. Notes which are not swung are known as straight notes. A
shuffle swing features a set of triplets where the middle note is skipped. On a jazz
score chart, a normal 2/4 (half-step), (waltz/foxtrot) or 4/4 (straight-ahead) is

followed by the style of music the performer should have in mind when playing the
chart: shuffle, swing, rock, etc. But in classical music, the term swing is not listed, nor
any other style of music for that matter. These composers employ something called
compound time which are literally triplets within a duple meter.

VI
The groove is not a place devoid of emotions, actually it is quite the opposite of that.
When one enters into a groove, through dance, music, sport or any other kind of activity
from culinary efforts to construction and meditation they purge themselves of certain
negative thoughts, realizations and epiphanies which are released in an exertion of
emotion. In other words they undergo an extreme catharsis which is why reaching a
state of groove in just about any activity not only relieves the stress which it otherwise
causes but also becomes therapeutic and fun a game. Once a groove has been opened
up in space, it can still be felt in the area after the activity has ceased. The release of
cathartic sweat, as we shall refer to it, is an extremely potent chemical, to encourage
once again a groove-level activity. Actors often talk about being-in-the-groove when
they are on stage in performance. Perhaps they too, like the audience members,
experience a kind of catharsis, but the catharsis experienced among the rhapsodes must
be quite different than the classical catharsis of the spectators.
But as for music: the contemporary musicologist, Christopher Small, coined a
term Musicking. He claims that music is not an object but a process and therefore
linguistically, music is not a noun but a verb. This eventually serves to pertain to
electronic music versus live music and for this, we shall return to the concept later. But
in the meantime, this entices us to pay the artistic media a fresh purvey. Since it is a
process and groove is an ideal, more depends on objective feel in this version
instead of individual acumen. Again, the audience has just as much to do with the music
reaching a state of groove as the musicians themselves playing the music. In the essay,
Groovology and the Magic of Other Peoples Music, musicologist, Charles Keil, writes:
Who wants to interview Bo Diddley or Horace Silver or a great jazz drummer with the
double assumption that they may have mistaken ideas or models in their heads about

their most basic skills and/or that they may be unaware of these or still other skills? In
other words, who wants to admit that as a baseball player, Dock Ellis does not have
superhuman strength, and that when he pitched his no-hitter in 1968 against the San
Diego Padres, he was simply in-the-groove and even that state of mind was influenced
by a psychedelic drug (as will be explained in the following chapter). The truth is that
some of the very best musicians do not know or want to know what they are doing. And
this ignorance may indeed be their bliss and ours; you start thinking about the groove
too much and you can tighten up the necessary slippage [Feld, informal
communication] or lose it completely.11
As a child I would sit down on the piano bench in the living room and bang on the
familys brown, upright Acrasonic. I would come up with some fun musical ideas, just
through feel and improvisation. And then my grandmother would come up to me and
say, That sounds great. But can you do it again? And I would shrug in submission, not
exactly. Looking back at this retrospectively, it becomes clear that if I could
manufacture and tightly package the music that was happening by accident, the
experience would become less musical. And if indeed I had attained a state of groove
mentally while I was playing, then the music would be virtually impossible to recall.

VII
In this chapter of my essay, I wish to tell the story of one of Americas baseball
greats. Dock Ellis was a pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates from 1968 until 1979.

12

On

June 12, 1970, Dock Ellis threw a no-hitter. He had ingested the drug, LSD25. He
[Ellis] wrote about the experience in his 1976 autobiography. This writing is used, as
well as two other sources (High Times, August, 1987 and Lysergic World, 1993) I

11 http://musicgrooves.org/articles/GroovologyAndMagic.pdf
12 Doc Ellis' 1970 No Hitter.

Original Author Unknown. Maintained and Updated by

Erowid.https://www.erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd_history3.shtml

found through some online retrieval; (Ellis is referred to in the third-person and also
gives interviews in the first-person). 13
The pitcher woke up late one July morning thinking he and his team had a dayoff. He had 3 doses of acid in the refrigerator. He ate breakfast and read the
newspaper when his girlfriend returned and at noon, the two dropped the acid.
It is said that Ellis put a record on the player. His girlfriend was engrossed in
the newspaper.
Dock, it says here youre pitching today!
What? Dock replied. He took the paper from her, scanned it and read:
PITTSBURGH @ PADRES
DOUBLEHEADER (6 P.M.)
Ellis (4-4) vs. Roberts (3-3).
Back then it costed $9.50 to fly to San Diego. recalls Ellis in a magazine interview
printed in Lycergic World. She got me to the airport at 3:30. he recalls about his
girlfriend. I got there at 4:30, and the game started at 6:05pm. It was a twi-night
doubleheader.
He makes it into the game and after having someone help him find the locker, he
suits up and enters onto the field. Pitching for the Padres was Dave Roberts. At the
end of the first inning, baseball great Roberto Clemente, hit one back to the box.
Dock marched up to the mound.
High Times Magazine:
His fingers tingled as he squeezed the ball. He squinted to see catcher Jerry May's
hand signals. He nodded his head and went into his windup, falling slightly off
balance in the process. The ball hit the ground about two feet in front of the plate
and skipped into May's glove. May signaled for a fastball outside. Dock wound up
and threw a hot one over the corner of the plate - a swinging strike! In was no
ordinary pitch: The ball burst from Dock's hand and left a blazing, comet-like tail
13 Huxley, Aldous. The Doors of Perception. 1956.

that

remained

visible

long

after

the

ball

was

caught.

His concentration [] was superb. As long as he kept to his fastball, the comets
kept burning across the plate. All he had to do was steer the ball down the
multicolored path. Dock had a crazed look in his eyes and his lack of control was
evident to the batters, many of whom were feeling increasingly vulnerable in the
batter's box. Dock easily retired three batters in a row [in the second inning].

Lycergic World:
I was zeroed in on the (catcher's) glove, but I didn't hit the glove too much. I
remember hitting a couple of batters and the bases were loaded two or three times.
The ball was small sometimes, the ball was large sometimes I saw the catcher,
sometimes I didn't. Sometimes I tried to stare the hitter down and throw while I
was looking at him. I chewed my gum until it turned to powder. They say I had
about three to four fielding chances. I remember diving out of the way of a ball I
thought was a line drive. I jumped, but the ball wasn't hit hard and never reached
me.
The Seventh Inning:
The Pirates were clinging to their 1-0 lead. Dock was staring at the scoreboard
when he realized he had just pitched a hitless ball for seven innings.

The effects of the LSD25 which Dock Ellis is under in the above-mentioned anecdote have
often been said to induce a groovy mental state in the patient. This is why beginning in
the mid-1960s, electric rock n roll music would be performed at parties where this drug
was used in concert with psychedelic light shows and day-glo paint. The party-goers,
under the influence of the acid are inspired to express themselves creatively, while in the
groove and most commonly: to dance. Other drugs known to have psychedelic effects,
similar to LSD25 (a chemical compound which originates partially on the fungus which
grows on rye) are Psilocybin which are found in the fungi that grows under cow dung and
Mescalin which is found in the roots of Peyote cacti. In 1956, the British journalist, Aldous
Huxley, wrote about his experiences one afternoon in the 50s while tripping on Mescalin:

Half an hour after swallowing the drug I became aware of a slow dance of golden lights.

A little later there were sumptuous red surfaces swelling and expanding from bright
nodes of energy that vibrated with a continuously changing, patterned life. he wrote.
Space was still there; but it had lost its predominance. The mind was primarily

concerned, not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning. And again he
mentions that Interest in space is diminished and interest in time falls almost to zero.
This would mean that the mind is in a receptive mode, when it is psychedelic, to create
or unlock a groove where space and time become diminished and almost indiscernable.